BITcoin & Cryptocurrency is not an investment. It’s a gamble, a “Ponzi-like” speculative bubble.

A few point-by-point facts before I begin my personal commentary – to make it easier for you, dear reader to digest and consider. Hopefully when you’ve read this, you will see it is clearly nothing more than a speculative bubble driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). References at the bottom of the article.

DISCLAIMER: regarding grammar, I tend to write and then correct as I re-read (I don’t blog for money – I’m an ICT consultant, with no proof-reading staff)

So, BITcoin…

has been called a “Ponzi scheme with no-one in charge”. Mathematicians[28] [29] think so as well and are concerned it’s just going to be used as vehicle to transfer wealth from new investors to the more shrewd investors and market manipulators. New investment is continuously needed to keep value in the currency. Without “hype” and the “Fear of Missing Out”, it has no intrinsic value. It is worth Zero Dollars.

is not legal tender. You can’t pay your taxes with it.

is not a currency. It is simply too volatile, too slow to use as a mainstream payment system. You could covert US$1,000,000 into crypto-tokens and it may only be worth US$900,000 only a few hours later. With this extreme volatility, even as a money-transfer service, it is impractical and essentially useless.

was a proof-of-concept, an experiment, a prototype, an initial proposal – not fully worked out – not intended to go live, mainstream. It was supposed to (originally) be a cheap, fast, decentralized, distributed, unregulated payment system. It is anything but that now.[2] [34]

has already back in 2016 been deemed a “failed experiment” by some of its founding developers. Mike Hearn and others have pointed this out.[1]

has had traders and speculators seeing an easy “cash cow” then punted it as a “store of value”, comparing it to intangible “digital” gold – with something that many feel is a perpetual Ponzi scheme that can climb 3000% in a year and then plummet 50% in a few days, it’s far too volatile to be called anything with the word “store” in it. It can jump up and down 10~20% in a few hours.

has failed the test of a “store of value” as it is insanely volatile and now traders are they trying to sell it purely on “how secure” as a service it is. With every pillar of the BITcoin experiment failing, traders move the goalposts and definition of “what” it actually is.

is not secure in the broader sense at all. In light of the theft, hacking, money laundering, and little to no convictions, it can’t seriously be considered a secure eco-system at all. Only the public ledger is partially “secure” (barring the possibility of “majority miner rule changing rules and protocols or corruption”), but security in the tech world in a broader sense extends way beyond the technology used for merely storing an item. By the very virtue that it is unregulated, fraud and market manipulation are easy to perpetuate. Repeated stories of hacking with absolutely no recourse, BITcoin owners being held at gunpoint, forced to transfer their funds to other wallets. At least within the banking system, most times, you get your money back if your account is hacked. All you’re going to get if your wallet is hacked on an exchange is a “heart-felt” apology from the owners of the Exchange. This has happened multiple times by multiple exchanges since #cryptocurrencies became popular. [3] [4] [5]

is undeniably an ecosystem that enables criminals to be more effective. There is almost no recourse in event of a theft. If your money is stolen, its gone. Even the SEC has gone on record saying this – “We can’t get your money back” – there is no public protection. [21] [11]

is not a very scalable technology and is in all likelihood a really bad use for BLOCKCHAIN technology. The more computers you add to the network, the slower it becomes. This is completely illogical and shows bad design. Even the so-called “lightning network” is just adding a band-aid on an old problem and extremely unnecessary complexity to a system that has already failed as a payment delivery system. [8]

as a payment network is excessively slow due to unavoidable scalable technology issues right at its core, the distributed database ecosystem is clunky and transactions, verifications, synchronization heavily affected by throughput and latency, realistically only does about one (1) to seven (7) transactions per second – world-wide – compared to tens of thousands per second by other payment systems. [7]

has massive delays in processing transactions depending on the network, can’t handle masses of simultaneous transactions with hours, days of unconfirmed transaction backlogs being common at its peak popularity for relatively few transactions world-wide compared to what VISA, MasterCard, or even PayPal deal with in a few seconds. [24] [8]

token exchanges slowed down and regularly crashed with little over 200,000 transactions in the queue – conveniently often during mass sell-off periods – sometimes going off-line, locking people out of their wallets for hours, days.

has an issue with its database / ledger size growth being exponential and not sustainable and a threat to the (already compromised) decentralized ecosystem as only people with a lot of capital will be able to mine, and hence, only a few active players will control the ledger, protocols, etc.

as a database system used for a public ledger for recording currency transactions, it appears to be a grossly misplaced, inefficient, wasteful technology and not really suited for what BLOCKCHAIN “could” probably be better used for. [24]

is very expensive to use as a payment system as miner transaction fees increase. This will only be compounded further as fewer bitcoins are mined, difficulty increases and miners need to pay their capital expenditure, maintenance, systems to “filter & clean” power, air-conditioning, security and electricity costs via ever-increasing mining transactions.

is already close to this, but will ultimately not be a decentralized system if it manages to grow much further. In fact, right now over 67% of the mining is controlled by four or five main actors. All you’ve done is replace the old banking 1% with a new (arguably less trustworthy) shadowy 1%.

protocol is controlled by the mining pool with the largest, most influential network and with only a few actors needed to make up the 51% domination, the entire system is open to massive manipulation and corruption by miners, exchange owners and other alt-coins inflating the price.

appears to actually promote criminal behaviour and new crimes. It’s already determined that for such a niche service, it has just under half of its transactions used by criminal elements of society. Not only that, we’ve seen an uptick in illegally installed BITcoin mining embedded on web-sites, illegally installed on servers, slowing down productivity and wasting resources.

does not derive value from merely being limited in supply. Rarity is determined by uniqueness, desirability as well as numerous other factors relating to the item, eg. the condition, the history, the social attachment. The only desirability of BITcoin is the FOMO – “Fear Of Missing Out” – (ie. hype-based speculation) comparing a BITcoin to a painting or baseball card is absurd. One BITcoin, at a byte level remains the same – a string of characters, at a BIT level, a series of Ones and Zeros. It’s unique, but it’s not inherently “special”.

is unreliable, unpredictable and volatile. If you don’t pay a high enough transaction fee, your transfers could be stuck in limbo and never processed by the miners. You need to perform all sorts of IT aerobics to return your BITcoin to your wallet (eventually, maybe).

is overly complex and long-winded, time-consuming to use – See the video on “How to draw cash from an ATM” and “the US$76 pizza” in the reference section at the bottom. [8] [17]

is just simply ecologically wasteful expenditure of energy.

can’t be used to realistically run a business set of accounts. The database design is a write one-way direction, ever appending, ever expanding system. BLOCKCHAIN could be used far more efficiently than current crypto-tokens databases for better applications.

is actually highly susceptible to fraud if you release goods in good faith before the transaction is cleared as “in your wallet”. In spite of claims to the contrary, it is entirely possible to initiate a so-called double-spend transaction to cancel a transaction in progress (which can take hours) – this is why it can take several hours to withdraw cash from an IT and why it is such an insanely long winded process.

has been called a “Pump and Dump” scheme by the “Wolf of Wallstreet”, Jordon Belfort. Why on earth would you not heed advice from a guy who says: “Hey, I was arrested for doing this! Why are you all investing in the same scheme?”

is less secure than national currencies. Because of its design, anyone who gets access to your “private key” has access to all your funds and authority to spend them.

has only two real “proven use” cases after over eight years: “criminal activity and speculation”

has no recourse (even in non-criminal instances) if your coins are lost, stolen. Security & Exchange (SEC) has warned against this already numerous times. You’re on your own.[11]

is not better than Paypal, or numerous other payment systems that are already available. So why use it? Why re-invent the wheel when it’s already been discovered and attempt to get the same performance out of a square-shaped wheel?

Steve Wozniak (Apple) played with BITcoin mining (as did the writer of this article) – he doesn’t endorse it.

More people are not using BITcoin. In fact, the use has contracted. Many large companies have found it too volatile and impractical.

Blockchain is not BITcoin. The former is a database. The latter is something that uses a blockchain database to work.

BITcoin will only ever have 21,000,000 coins – debateable – the ledger and protocol has been changed numerous times already – rules are determined by the majority. Not set in stone. Also, at any time, a “fork” can occur where essentially “one” currency becomes split into two.

BITcoin ledger can’t be corrupted. Not true. It can if enough processing power is used. Already enough power to do this is in the hand of a few mining pools.

BLOCKCHAIN is not new. It has been around for almost a decade. “Hype” has made it seem like this amazing new technology. Cluster Servers, Distributed Servers and Services have been around even longer.

So, after stating the obvious above (links to credible sources below) – as for personal opinion and condemnation, I get a lot of pushback from people asking why I am so negative regarding these crypto-currencies, BITcoin, alt-coin, etc.

This will be the last time I refer to any of them as a “currency”. I will call them by what they are and that is “tokens” of exchange. Basically, “digital casino chips” if you will.

A more accurate description would be “tokens of depreciation”

First off, I absolutely do not dispute that some lucky people who mined these tokens back in 2010 and then held onto them didn’t get lucky and made some money. Also, some people bought low and sold high – early adopters. This is all irrelevant. Back then, people were led to believe crypto-tokens in their current form were a viable, inexpensive payment system.

Secondly, as it is purely speculative, no-one is disputing it may go up again. It may even go up to US$10,000. The point is that it is purely driven by speculation, by hype, by FOMO. It has no real intrinsic value and a very limited purpose.

Even pyramid scheme participants as well as early Ponzi scheme adopters made money while it lasted. Some older Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes are still alive in some form or another – even after class-action lawsuits. It doesn’t detract from the fact that new people don’t have much hope of making any real money.

Many other scams or failed ideas/scheme or may have had some people profit off pure luck or early adoption at the expense of the losses of other, more vulnerable people who bought later. Morally, it doesn’t make it more acceptable or viable.

An interjection here – more and more companies are abandoning BITcoin and crypto-tokens for use (see reference to Morgan Stanley study below) as it is simply slow, has scalability issues and us impractical. Microsoft tends to flip/flop between accepting/banning it and have now settled on a system of you topping up your Microsoft Account, then spending US$ in your account, but not using it as a direct-pay system. Microsoft keep the façade of BITcoin being useful because they sell a much more advanced version of Blockchain in their Azure service and I think they assume (probably correctly) most managers or finance guys are too ignorant to understand the difference between the Blockchain database and service and BITcoin. See Blockchain on Azure. It is a much, much more refined, practical and robust version of the Blockchain database, however and not the same as the system BITcoin uses.

My negativity is an partially an emotional reaction, but mostly logical and rational. The reason I feel most passionately about it is the gross ignorance and negligence displayed by people willing to risk their (and other peoples) life savings in what is a gamble.

Recently it came to my attention that a very, very elderly close friend of the family was approached by her own daughter because her son wanted to “make her money” by withdrawing all her cash and investing her pension investment in #BITcoin. Obviously planning to take a fair commission for his efforts. Nothing like gambling with other peoples money?

This angers me. There is a genuine psychological condition evident here with these “crypto nuts” similar to the “gold fever” sickness associated with greed of those engaged in a gold rush of yesteryear.

It seems to even affect seemingly intelligent people – like some sort of warped tribal, quasi-religion infection. They become belligerent and aggressive when you doubt their belief in the power of crypto. These people, seem to display all the characteristics of a religious zealot and many refer to them as the “cult of crypto” and there is no clearer indication of this when a family member tries to take advantage of her own mother and gamble with their life-savings with complete and utter disregard for their continued well-being.

It’s akin to retribution behaviour from members of Scientology when you question or doubt their “belief”.

This whole cult thing reminds me of when friends were trying to sell me the next “get rich quick scheme”. Whether it was a pyramid scheme where I had to bring a friend to a meeting and bring money to “invest” or simply just give money to invest. I’ve seen it in Network Level Marketing schemes – buy this starter pack for herbal products, seen it on Pyramid Schemes. I’ve seen it in Forex Trading. Now, the latest fad is “trading in Crypto”.

Warning bells go off pretty quickly where google and Facebook is entirely saturated with mostly positive news regarding “buy crypto” and they usually all appear to be mostly the same “crypto” web sites.
It’s certainly a red flag when Facebook bans crypto-trading and crypto-currency ads and keeps the forex trading ones.

When I see CNBC and see their so-called “experts”, it makes me chuckle. Getting lucky, having good fortune on a gamble now makes you an “expert” in a field of economics and financial investment? I almost fear we’re actually living in a dystopian world of “Idiocracy” especially when I see a 19 year old going on tour after essentially winning the lotto by cashing in his bitcoins and then giving financial advice to the masses?

Next, I half-expect to see Lotto / Powerball winners being declared “Lottery Experts” having their knowledge being up-scaled purely on the merit of their winnings and compared on a level equal to Financial Experts? No degrees. Just happened to win a binary lotto ticket. All these young millionaires basically just got lucky. It wasn’t even a gamble. They just happened to have some winning tickets in some technology that gained value due to someone seeing a way to bring it to the mainstream. Most didn’t even have programming skills. It was just a hobby. Just lucky.

Yet, YouTube and the media suddenly has a plethora of these Crypto “Experts”, Crypto “Market” Analysts, Crypto Expert Traders routinely thumb-sucking some magical buy and sell point when the value of these tokens is unlike anything else ever in the history of the financial system. It’s not a fixed asset. It’s not an effective payment system. It’s not a legal tender. It’s not even a really good service. It employs no-one really. It has no real intrinsic value except that it wastes vast quantities of electricity.

The crypto-cult truly are pretty similar to extreme fundamentalists in their declaration of faith and belief. Often using the same terminology and rituals. They’ve even coined a few tag mantra’s like “FUD” and “HODL” – FUD being the response to anyone questioning their belief in the power of crypto claiming the heathens who disagree, the unbelievers are spreading Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. FUD. When you point out the price is sliding, the retort is often: HODL! – which is supposed be some sort of thing the “cool” kids say which means: “HOLD, don’t sell” or “Hold On for Dear Life”

You will immediately be attacked if you comment in opposition to a member of the “Cult of Crypto” called a “Dinosaur” and your intelligence questioned and doubt sown on your ability: “you simply don’t understand!” – even if you have over 20 years experience in ICT, database programming experience, or even if you’re one of the early, original developers of the actual BLOCKCHAIN technology who profess the experiment of crypto-tokens / BITCOIN has failed (as Mike Hearn did in 2016 already), or even if you’re a Cambridge Professor of security and economics or have a doctorate in security expertise who points out shortcomings, limitations of the underlying BLOCKCHAIN technology.

No, you do not understand and you will be scorned and cast out! You are simply spreading F.U.D.

The #CultOfCrypto generally hate government and are distrusting of it. They are quite willing to use their “superior” system of payment that has slower payment times, much higher transaction fees and have no recourse if it is lost or stolen rather than use the evil government money.

These anti-corporate, anti-establishment nutjobs then wonder “why” life is dealing them such a rough hand, why “the man” is treating them so unfairly. Government and corporates keep the lights on, keep the water flowing. It’s nice calling on the government police force when someone steals your money, breaks into your home. Nice to have medical attention when needed. If you don’t trust society, how do you expect to get along in it? It’s not the best system, but it’s worked pretty well so far.

I’ve witnessed similar hypocritical, social misfits in life who boldly claim “I trust no-one” and casually sip on their coke as if they didn’t rely on the trust of the water filtration experts, the manufacturer of the cans, the sterilization processes, the chemists that formulated the drink, the manufacturers of the machines that mixed it, the FDA that double-checked it wasn’t poisonous.

They naively believe that their currency can operate in a vacuum independent of governments. Yet, the value of a #BITcoin is only determined by what someone is prepared to pay for it in legal tender – ie. $US, Euro, Yen, etc.

What they don’t realize is that BITcoin’s eco-system/ledger is like a casino and the tokens are gambling chips. The banks and credit card companies are the tellers. If you close the tellers, you can’t cash your chips.

Not only that, at least half of all #BITcoin transactions have been linked to criminal activity. Let that sink in – what type of people you are dealing with, supporting financially and then, maybe you will understand why so many hacks and thefts have occurred of this token exchange system.

Why do you think almost all Cybercrime, ransomware now demands payment in BITcoin? Can we really put faith in a payment system that is untraceable and allows criminals to extort money from you with no recourse?

Why do you think banks have now banned purchasing bitcoin and other cryptocurrency with credit cards? If your bank card is hacked and the hacker buys crypto-tokens, your money is gone, untraceable.

Indeed, even the underlying BLOCKCHAIN technology has better uses outside of the crypto-token market. It just doesn’t scale well with massive daily transactions. It’s too slow, too clunky, too expensive. There are simply better options available.

The loud-mouth, obnoxious extreme libertarians who lose their money, end up on the streets living the dream as a homeless person, I couldn’t care less for, but the vulnerable, the old, the ignorant who are just trying to make a few bucks, I really don’t want to see them get hurt by this movement, this bubble.

Why on earth would you buy into this, hype, this bubble? It’s going to crash, and crash pretty darn hard – economists and professors know this and have tried to warn you. Don’t gamble on it – especially not with a loan or someone else’s money.

How many economic experts do you need to tell you it is a bubble? How many professors? And yet, you get these ignoramus “experts” – people that “know IT and crypto” telling their family members that they know better.

Do you honestly, sincerely think that banks, governments are going to let something like this succeed, something that better enables terrorism, that better enables money laundering, drug dealing, arms dealing, tax evasion? Seriously? At some point, you need to actually use your common sense. These tokens can’t exist without a credible endorsement and acceptance. Not only that, they’re terrible in design and performance from a technological perspective.

Eventually, a better world-wide payment system will be adopted. None of the current crypto-tokens are “it”, however. These are just speculative gambles.

How on earth can, in spite of constant clamp-downs, threats of banning, regulation can anyone claim this entire unregulated eco-system is not being heavily manipulated?
Apple has a battery issue and stock drops 5% in a day. BITcoin drops due to real, valid scandals, thefts and damning allegations that would destroy most companies – and then magically shoots up again? It’s not logical. There is something fishy going on here. Only fools and charlatans would believe otherwise.

A fully transparent, regulated, secure system is what will ultimately succeed. Something you can charge interest on and not incur huge transaction fees.

Although it’s highly unlikely, as it’s unregulated, shady and driven by hype, BITcoin may very well jump up to US$20,000 again, but ultimately it will fail because it’s Version 1.0 of something that on release wasn’t ready for going live, so basically, a “beta” work-in-progress idea that was sold as a working model.

Hype and Fear of Missing Out is irrational, so no-one knows when the final spiral of doom will happen. BITcoin, however is not sustainable as a technology. It’s just too buggy – hence why so many “marketing” changes and touting of “why” it’s supposed to be worth something.

The last person to buy into a bubble is always going to be hit the hardest. No-one knows in a Ponzi scheme when this is. It could be today or tomorrow. It could be at US$5,000 or even US$15,000 – it’s a gamble and when it crashes, you will lose and only the exchange owners will get the opportunity to cash out. It’s happened far to frequently when a sell-off happens that the more popular exchanges suddenly experience “technical difficulties” and users are locked out, unable to cash out their tokens for cash.

Ultimately, however, be prepared for the house to win, to cash out, take all and that you will inevitably lose everything.

The Resolution of the BITcoin experiment / Mike Hearn: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7“From the start, I’ve always said the same thing: Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail. So don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose. I’ve said this in interviews, on stage at conferences, and over email. So have other well known developers like Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik. But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly.”

Bitcoin.org has abandoned its claims for fast transactions at low fees… for now: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/01/22/bitcoin-fast-transactions-low-fees/“One of the things that got people excited about Bitcoin in the first place was its promise to deliver fast peer-to-peer transactions at a fraction of standard fees.”

February 6, 2018 Bitcoin: Lloyds bans credit card purchases“Banks on both sides of the Atlantic have banned the use of credit cards to buy Bitcoin, fearing their customers could get into debt as the value of the crypto-currency plunges down.”